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Collection of Your Personal Information
Last updated: June 2009
First and foremost, Four White Mice will never sell, lease or rent its e-mail subscriber lists or any profile information to any third party!
At some Four White Mice sites, we ask you to provide personal information, such as your e-mail address, name, home or work address, or telephone number. We may also collect demographic information, such as your ZIP code, age, gender, preferences, interests and favorites. If you choose to make a purchase or sign up for a paid subscription service, we will ask for additional information, such as your credit card number and billing address, which is used to create a Four White Mice billing account.
In order to access some Four White Mice services, you will be asked to sign in with an e-mail address and password You can use the same credentials to sign in to many different Four White Mice sites and services, as well as those of select Four White Mice partners. By signing in on one Four White Mice site or service, you may be automatically signed into other Four White Mice sites and services. As part of creating your credentials, you may also be requested to provide questions and secret answers, which we use to help verify your identity and assist in resetting your password, as well as an alternate e-mail address. Some services may require added security, and in these cases, you may be asked to create an additional security key. Finally, a unique ID number will be assigned to your credentials which will be used to identify your credentials and associated information.
We may collect information about your interaction with Four White Mice sites and services. For example, we may use website analytics tools on our site to retrieve information from your browser, including the site you came from, the search engine(s) and the keywords you used to find our site, the pages you view within our site, your browser add-ons, and your browser's width and height. We may also use technologies, such as cookies and web beacons (described below), to collect information about the pages you view, the links you click and other actions you take on our sites and services. Additionally, we collect certain standard information that your browser sends to every website you visit, such as your IP address, browser type and language, access times and referring Web site addresses. We also deliver advertisements (see the Display of Advertising section below) and provide Web site analytics tools on non-Four White Mice sites and services, and we may collect information about page views on these third party sites as well.
When you receive newsletters or promotional e-mail from Four White Mice, we may use web beacons (described below), customized links or similar technologies to determine whether the e-mail has been opened and which links you click in order to provide you more focused e-mail communications or other information.
In order to offer you a more consistent and personalized experience in your interactions with Four White Mice, information collected through one Four White Mice service may be combined with information obtained through other Four White Mice services. We may also supplement the information we collect with information obtained from other companies. For example, we may use services from other companies that enable us to derive a general geographic area based on your IP address in order to customize certain services to your geographic area.
Use of Your Personal Information
Four White Mice collects and uses your personal information to operate and improve its sites and services. These uses may include providing you with more effective customer service; making the sites or services easier to use by eliminating the need for you to repeatedly enter the same information; performing research and analysis aimed at improving our products, services and technologies; and displaying content and advertising that are customized to your interests and preferences. For more information about the use of information for advertising, see the Display of Advertising section below.
We also use your personal information to communicate with you. We may send certain mandatory service communications such as welcome letters, billing reminders, information on technical service issues, and security announcements. Some Four White Mice services may send periodic member letters that are considered part of the service. We may also occasionally send you product surveys or promotional mailings to inform you of other products or services available from Four White Mice and its affiliates.
Personal information collected on Four White Mice sites and services may be stored and processed in the United States or any other country in which Four White Mice or its affiliates, subsidiaries or service providers maintain facilities. Four White Mice abides by the safe harbor framework as set forth by the U.S. Department of Commerce regarding the collection, use, and retention of data from the European Union.
Sharing of Your Personal Information
Except as described in this statement, we will not disclose your personal information outside of Four White Mice and its controlled subsidiaries and affiliates without your consent. Some Four White Mice sites allow you to choose to share your personal information with select Four White Mice partners so that they can contact you about their products, services or offers. Other sites do not share your contact information with third parties for marketing purposes, but instead may give you a choice as to whether you wish to receive communications from Four White Mice on behalf of external business partners about a partner's particular offering (without transferring your personal information to the third party). See the Communication Preferences section below for more information.
Some Four White Mice services may be co-branded and offered in conjunction with another company. If you register for or use such services, both Four White Mice and the other company may receive information collected in conjunction with the co-branded services.
We occasionally hire other companies to provide limited services on our behalf, such as handling the processing and delivery of mailings, providing customer support, hosting websites, processing transactions, or performing statistical analysis of our services. Those service providers will be permitted to obtain only the personal information they need to deliver the service. They are required to maintain the confidentiality of the information and are prohibited from using it for any other purpose. However, for credit card processing, our fraud detection vendors may use aggregate data to help improve their service. This helps them more accurately detect fraudulent uses of credit cards. We may access or disclose information about you, including the content of your communications, in order to: (a) comply with the law or respond to lawful requests or legal process; (b) protect the rights or property of Four White Mice or our customers, including the enforcement of our agreements or policies governing your use of the services; or (c) act on a good faith belief that such access or disclosure is necessary to protect the personal safety of Four White Mice employees, customers or the public.
Accessing Your Personal Information
You may have the ability to view or edit your personal information online. In order to help prevent your personal information from being viewed by others, you will be required to sign in with your credentials (e-mail address and password). The appropriate method(s) for accessing your personal information will depend on which sites or services you have used.
FourWhiteMice.com - You can access and update your profile on FourWhiteMice.com by visiting the Four White Mice.com Profile Center.
Four White Mice Billing and Account Services - If you have a Four White Mice Billing account, you can add to or update your information at the Four White Mice Billing Web site by clicking on the "Personal Information" or "Billing Information" links.
Four White Mice Partner Programs - If you are registered with Four White Mice Partner Programs, you can review and edit your profile by clicking Manage Your Account on the Partner Program Web site.
Some Four White Mice sites or services may collect personal information that is not accessible via the links above. However, in such cases, you may be able to access that information through alternative means of access described by the service. Or you can write us by using our Web form, and we will contact you within 30 days regarding your request.
Communication Preferences
You can stop the delivery of future promotional e-mail from Four White Mice sites and services by following the specific instructions in the e-mail you receive.
If you are registered with Four White Mice Partner Programs, you can set your contact preferences or choose to share your contact information with other Four White Mice partners by clicking Manage Your Account on the Partner Program Web site.
These choices do not apply to the display of online advertising. Nor do they apply to the receipt of mandatory service communications that are considered part of certain Four White Mice services, which you may receive periodically unless you cancel the service.
Display of Advertising
Many of the Web sites and online services we offer, as well as those of our partners, are supported by advertising. Through the Four White Mice Advertising Platform, we may display ads on our own sites and the sites of our advertising partners.
When we display online advertisements to you, we will place one or more persistent cookies on your computer in order to recognize your computer each time we display an ad to you. The cookies we use for advertising have an expiry date of no more than 2 years. Because we may serve advertisements on many different Web sites, we are able to compile information over time about where you, or others who are using your computer, saw and/or clicked on the advertisements we display. We use this information to make predictions about your characteristics, interests or preferences and to display targeted advertisements that we believe may be of interest to you. We may also associate this information with your subsequent visit, purchase or other activity on participating advertisers’ Web sites in order to determine the effectiveness of the advertisements.
While we may use some of the information we collect in order to personalize the ads we show you, we designed our systems to select ads based only on data that does not personally and directly identify you. For example, we may select the ads we display according to certain general interest categories or segments that we have inferred based on (a) demographic or interest data, including any you may have provided when creating an account (e.g. age, zip or postal code, gender), demographic or interest data acquired from other companies, and a general geographic location derived from your IP address, (b) the pages you view and links you click when using Four White Mice’s and its advertising partners’ Web sites and services, and (c) the search terms you enter when using Four White Mice’s Internet search services.
When we display personalized ads, we take a number of steps designed to protect your privacy. For example, we store page views, clicks and search terms used for ad personalization separately from your contact information or other data that directly identifies you (such as your name, e-mail address, etc.). Further, we have built in technological and process safeguards designed to prevent the unauthorized correlation of this data. We also give you the ability to opt-out of personalized ads.
Although the majority of the online advertisements on Four White Mice sites are displayed by Four White Mice, we also allow third-party ad serving companies, including other ad networks, to display advertisements on our sites. These companies currently include, but are not limited to: 24/7 Real Media, Advertising.com, BlueStreak, Burst Media, DoubleClick, EuroClick, Eyeblaster, EyeWonder, Interpolls, Kanoodle, Mediaplex, Pointroll, TangoZebra, Yahoo! Publisher Network, and Zedo.
These companies may offer you a way to opt-out of ad targeting based on their cookies, and some of them are also members of the Network Advertising Initiative. You may find more information by clicking on the company names above and following the links to the Web sites of each company.
Security of Your Personal Information
Four White Mice is committed to protecting the security of your information, including personal information, and information collected for advertising purposes. We use a variety of security technologies and procedures to help protect your personal information from unauthorized access, use, or disclosure. For example, we store the personal information you provide on computer systems with limited access, which are located in controlled facilities. When we transmit highly confidential information (such as a credit card number or password) over the Internet, we protect it through the use of encryption, such as the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protocol.
If a password is used to help protect your accounts and personal information, it is your responsibility to keep your password confidential. Do not share this information with anyone. If you are sharing a computer with anyone you should always log out before leaving a site or service to protect access to your information from subsequent users.
Collection and Use of Children's Personal Information
Four White Mice is for adults 18 and over ONLY. We do not knowingly collect any information on teenagers or children under the age of 18.
Use of Cookies
Four White Mice Web sites use "cookies" to enable you to sign in to our services and to help personalize your online experience. A cookie is a small text file that is placed on your hard disk by a Web page server. Cookies contain information that can later be read by a Web server in the domain that issued the cookie to you. Cookies cannot be used to run programs or deliver viruses to your computer.
One of the primary purposes of cookies is to store your preferences and other information on your computer in order to save you time by eliminating the need to repeatedly enter the same information and to display your personalized content and appropriate advertising on your later visits to these sites. Four White Mice Web sites also use cookies as described in the Collection of your Information and Display of Advertising sections of this privacy statement.
When you sign in to a site using your Four White Mice credentials, we store your unique ID number, and the time you signed in, in a cookie on your hard disk. This cookie allows you to move from page to page at the site without having to sign in again on each page. When you sign out, these cookies are deleted from your computer.
You have the ability to accept or decline cookies. Most Web browsers automatically accept cookies, but you can usually modify your browser setting to decline cookies if you prefer. If you choose to decline cookies, you may not be able to sign in or use other interactive features of Four White Mice sites and services that depend on cookies, and some advertising preferences that are dependent on cookies may not be able to be respected.
If you choose to accept cookies, you also have the ability to later delete cookies that you have accepted.
Use of Web Beacons
Four White Mice Web pages may contain electronic images known as Web beacons - sometimes called single-pixel gifs - that may be used to assist in delivering cookies on our sites and allow us to count users who have visited those pages and to deliver co-branded services. We may include Web beacons in promotional e-mail messages or our newsletters in order to determine whether messages have been opened and acted upon.
Four White Mice may also employ Web beacons from third parties in order to help us compile aggregated statistics regarding the effectiveness of our promotional campaigns or other operations of our sites. We prohibit Web beacons on our sites from being used by third parties to collect or access your personal information.
Finally, we may work with other companies that advertise on Four White Mice sites to place Web beacons on their sites in order to allow us to develop statistics on how often clicking on an advertisement on a Four White Mice site results in a purchase or other action on the advertiser's site.
Controlling Unsolicited E-mail ("Spam")
Four White Mice is concerned about controlling unsolicited commercial e-mail, or "spam." Four White Mice has a strict Anti-Spam Policy prohibiting the use of or other Four White Mice-provided e-mail account to send spam. Four White Mice will not sell, lease or rent its e-mail subscriber lists to third parties. While Four White Mice continues to actively review and implement new technology, such as expanded filtering features, there is no currently available technology that will totally prevent the sending and receiving of unsolicited e-mail. Using junk e-mail tools and being cautious about the sharing of your e-mail address while online will help reduce the amount of unsolicited e-mail you receive.
Changes to This Privacy Statement
We will occasionally update this privacy statement to reflect changes in our services and customer feedback. When we post changes to this Statement, we will revise the "last updated" date at the top of this statement. If there are material changes to this statement or in how Four White Mice will use your personal information, we will notify you either by prominently posting a notice of such changes prior to implementing the change or by directly sending you a notification. We encourage you to periodically review this statement to be informed of how Four White Mice is protecting your information.
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